American Life in Poetry: Column 176

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Hearts and flowers, that's how some people dismiss poetry, suggesting that's all there is to it, just a bunch of sappy poets weeping over love and beauty. Well, poetry is lots more than that. At times it's a means of honoring the simple things about us. To illustrate the care with which one poet observes a flower, here's Frank Steele, of Kentucky, paying such close attention to a sunflower that he almost gets inside it.

Sunflower

You're expected to see
only the top, where sky
scrambles bloom, and not
the spindly leg, hairy, fending off
tall, green darkness beneath.
Like every flower, she has a little
theory, and what she thinks
is up. I imagine the long
climb out of the dark
beyond morning glories, day lilies, four o'clocks
up there to the dream she keeps
lifting, where it's noon all day.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2001 by Frank Steele. Reprinted from "Singing into That Fresh Light," co-authored with Peggy Steele, ed., Robert Bly, Blue Sofa Press, 2001, by permission of Frank Steele. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Acceptance of Individual Authors
Second in a Series

–by Charles A. Taormina
Copyright © 2008 by Charles A. Taormina

Recently, in a casual talk with Rager Media’s editor, Christopher White, I broached the question of writer’s acceptance, all writers or one writer, new or old. We considered an article by novelist and instructor, David Hollander, a Poets & Writers columnist, who questioned why so many authors in the classroom were put through writers’ or readers’ group sessions, especially via MFA writing programs. It begs the question of integrity, about each writer doing his or her personal creativity. Hollander, also a guitarist, wrote: “At no time does a musician sit in a circle of fifteen strangers from disparate musical backgrounds, play his song, and then allow them to ‘offer feedback’ on it.” (Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2006)

Inspired by that comment, I took it a step further in asking would a painter, sculptor, or other artist ever do that? Do you think Van Gogh or Rodin or Picasso would’ve ever turned from his outdoor paint box or marble or easel, to stop in the midst of an unfinished stone or canvas, to ask a passerby which was a better shade of pastel, or which cut was more responsive, which Cubist eye more astute for Picasso? Yet a writer works away as an individual artist, then amidst a crew of well-intentioned listeners, attempts to change his or her art, with a hundred and one possibly boorish or bad suggestions. It’s a corporate/university mindset, the “team member” concept, a good ole’ boy sports scene, rule by conformist Groupthink . . . Even Hollywood puts nearly finished films through the rigors of “focus groups,” where final endings are tested for popularity amongst unwary twelve-year-olds (How to ruin a film: “Fatal Attraction” was turned from complex adult cinema with an original ending that displayed Glenn Close’s character’s feelings of self-destruction, to the actual finale of a goofy, shower stall knife attack). My point is that acceptance needs to be a consideration of our publishing process, what it means and what it should or could mean, for serious writers and readers, for the individual. One person writes for one person at a time to read. Acceptance needs to expand if our culture is to prevail.

Perhaps, for those not so familiar with contemporary publishing these days, especially the sort who write online, use POD (Print On Demand), broadside or independent printing, and to a certain extent for the smaller presses, this effort is all held at bay. “Print On Demand” refers to setting up a one-time computer file process for a printable book (complete with page layout, cover design, all finished editorial processes) and then being able to print one book at a time from that file, on order, or twenty books or as many as desired. The process can be expensive, moderately priced ($500/book), or free. The process is open to individuals, not only university or corporate conglomerates. It suddenly allows for new authors or controversial writers to print books, or even publishers wanting to keep an out-of-print book available for instant order (without having to invest in overprinting and warehousing thousands of volumes). It thus eliminates three pitfalls of traditional publishing: publication scarcity, warehousing of volumes, and bookstore return of unsold books. (www.paraview.com)

Also, we must consider direct online publishing with the massive increase in web logs, or blogging. Some years ago in an e-mail comment to Dan Poynter, author of The Self-Publishing Manual and prodigious organizer, lecturer, and consultant for the self-publishing industry, I commented on his statement about how “the Internet has become our library.” My reply was how the Internet also has become our new printing press. Today, we might add, it’s become our primary distribution channel (and with the proliferation and easy transmission of entirely electronic books, or e-books, we might suggest that the Internet’s our complete process for library storage, printing, and distribution). The number of blogs now is estimated at over 112 million, with 175,000 starting new each day (www.technorati.com). Renaissance? To explore creatively, we have to look for sites or ways to navigate all that, which of course is why there are new services: Technorati, BlogScope, and Bloglines.

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–By Christopher D. White

Legendary journalist and Pulitzer Prize co-winner Abe Zaidan near Akron, in November, 2007. Photo by Christopher D. White.

Notable Manuscripts in Circulation:
Abe Zaidan's history of the Civic Theatre, and his first foray into fiction.

Abe Zaidan is a legend: not just in Akron, having been a veteran reporter and editor/columnist for The Akron Beacon Journal for many years, or in Cleveland, where he worked for The Plain Dealer for years–but nationally, too. Zaidan has written hundreds of articles for The Washington Post and most of our nation's other major daily newspapers. His collected political writings, introduced by the esteemed Dr. John C. Green of the Bliss Institute, was recently published by The University of Akron Press. Many people also don't know that he shares a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Kent State shootings.

Zaidan now has two worthy book projects in search of a publisher. One is primarily of local interest, because it's a history of The Civic Theatre, and it features a lot of stories about The Civic's quirky history as a venue that has always been on the edge of impending demise. It also features previously unpublished photos that would be of great interest to a lot of Akronites and former Akronites, regardless of the fact that its appeal is likely to be limited to those who would take an interest in things that are decidedly Akrocentric. But as many of us know, there is a rather significant market for Akrocentrica. Even though there are less than a quarter of a million people residing inside the city limits of Akron, our metro area is at least twice that number, depending on whose estimates you pay attention to, and our country is peopled with pockets of Akron expats who had to leave their beloved Motherland to seek a more gainful future. But Akronites tend maintain a high level of attachment to Rubber City, for one reason or another, even when they're forced to leave — or even when that attachment is of the dysfunctional love-hate variety, because they've been hurt by a town that tends to piss on its best products, and/or piss them off.

The Clevelandcentric publisher Gray and Co. apparently passed on The Civic Theatre history because it was too Akrocentric. I find that to be remarkable, considering how many books from Gray and Co. one will find in Akron, and I think that Gray and Co., of all places, ought to know the value of a book like this, if only in this area.

The other Zaidan book is a novel called Moose, about a newspaper editor by the name of Frank Moosey (A.K.A Moose), who thoroughly enjoys the life of a newspaper man — until the paper is run into the ground by corporate outsiders with no knowledge of the newspaper business and a ruthless obsession with the bottom line.

For all of the accolades that he has received over the years, Zaidan says that he feels more strongly about this novel than anything he's ever written up to this point. This is a very personal piece; he has put his heart into it, and it shows. Those who know Zaidan as the veteran journalist will see an interesting new side to him.

What will be fascinating to average readers is the insider's look into what the newsroom is really like (well, maybe not so much nowadays); but any notion that one might have about reporters being angelic and upstanding do-gooders may be a little shocked to read about the sort of shenanigans and tomfoolery that transpire behind the news-print curtain. The level and frequency of banal and childish behavior that goes on makes it a fun and fascinating read. There's also quite a bit of profanity and tasteless humor, which is refreshing to read about in our overly sanitized age. I can't be the only one who wants to puke when I think that school children nowadays are routinely expected to bring hand sanitizer with them as part of their school supplies (no offense to GOJO — who no doubt sheds no tears over this clean-hands policy). This is a fascinating novel that ought to be picked up by an agent for representation to publishers, because there's no doubt that a lot of people would love to get an insider's view into the newsroom. There's no shortage of, say, "Inside So-and-so State Prison" documentaries and "real stories" from emergency rooms and crime labs, but not much about what it's like to work in mass media.

Click here for information about becoming a member of "The Marquee Club" and helping to support the "Jewel on Main Street." This site also has more information about Civic Theatre, which was built in 1929, and which underwent a major renovation in 2002.

Click here for more about Abe Zaidan's book PORTRAITS OF POWER: OHIO AND NATIONAL POLITICS, 1964-1994. This book is part of the University of Akron Press's Series on Ohio Politics. Though the University of Akron Press does publish quite a few titles of local interest, quite a few of its offerings are of national interest, including the Akron Series in Poetry, which is a well known national poetry book series.

PHOTO: The Christensen Marbleworks (1903-1922) in Akron, Ohio is America’s oldest still standing toy factory. Courtesy of Michael C. Cohill

Of course we all know that Akron is the birthplace of the rubber industry. But did you know that Akron is also the birthplace of the modern toy industry?

Help save this national treasure: click here to sign the online petition to save America's oldest toy factory.

–by Michael C. Cohill

The company compound of The M.F. Christensen & Son Company (1903-1922) is the oldest still- standing toy company in the USA. It was “the first and original glass toy marble factory in America.” These marbles created an entire industry and are today the most popular toy in the world. The building stands in the birthplace of the modern toy industry. It was one of 32 local toy marble companies and one of over 150 local toy companies. The five buildings making up the compound are still in near original condition.

Christensen’s marbles were sold on six of the world’s seven continents and dominated the toy industry from the moment of their appearance in the market in 1903 until 1917 when they stopped manufacturing. His marbles put out of business all American glass marble shops and almost wiped out glass marble production in Germany. He later licensed his 1905 patent for glass marbles to the German’s thereby saving their 60 year old industry and they continued their production until 1936.

The method of manufacturing glass marbles that Christensen invented in 1910 is still in use today. Outside of hand-made ‘art spheres’ Christensen’s invention is the only method used to make marbles, for play, for floral and decorative uses and for industrial purposes.

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Photo: At Glendale Cemetary, Akron, Ohio. Courtesy of Andrzej Starczewski, Rager Media

American Life in Poetry: Column 159

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Bad news all too often arrives with a ringing telephone, all too early in the morning. But sometimes it comes with less emphasis, by regular mail. Here Allan Peterson of Florida gets at the feelings of receiving bad news by letter, not by directly stating how he feels but by suddenly noticing the world that surrounds the moment when that news arrives.

The Inevitable

To have that letter arrive
was like the mist that took a meadow
and revealed hundreds
of small webs once invisible
The inevitable often
stands by plainly but unnoticed
till it hands you a letter
that says death and you notice
the weed field had been
readying its many damp handkerchiefs
all along

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Allan Peterson, whose most recent book of poetry is "All the Lavish in Common," U. of Mass. Pr., 2005, winner of the Juniper Prize. Reprinted from "The Chattahoochee Review," Winter 2007, V. 27, no. 2, by permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Photo: Grave of John R. Buchtel, founder of The University of Akron at Glendale Cemetery, downtown Akron. Courtesy of Andrzej Starczewski, Rager Media

By Christopher D. White, Editor-in-Chief, Rager Media.

Most poetry is unreadable–some because it's just badly written, and some because, even if expertly written, are just plain boring. But this has always been the case, as you'll see if you investigate the archives of our nation's best litmags. Try reading the other poems in the issue of Poetry magazine where T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was first published, and you'll see what I mean. Eliot's poem is a case of one poet stumbling upon writing an eternally relevant and excellent poem. He went on to write a handful of other excellent poems, and then proceeded to churn out a lot of worthless drivel for the rest of his life, including a horrible and over-rated, though historically important poem called "The Waste Land," a poem whose best lines were written by Shakespeare, not Eliot. Granted, "The Waste Land" was greatly improved by Ezra Pound's liberal editing, as the surviving manuscripts show, and it has exerted enormous influence on poetry for many decades, but it's an example of a poem that just doesn't matter much nowadays. Prufrock, on the other hand, remains one of the greatest poems ever written.

For me, the poetry of A.R. Ammons fits into the category of hopelessly boring, even when it's well written. Never mind that Ammons won the National Book Award and has been put on a pedestal in American Letters, his poems are almost universally dull. The poet Jean Valentine
once wrote an essay on Ammons' poetry which is useful for understanding this, though I can't recall the name of the essay off the top of my head.

Speaking of Jean Valentine: here's an enlightening case study of the politics of publishing. In an interview, Valentine was once asked about how she had a hard time breaking into the litmags for years, and what it was that finally made her fortunes change. She said that the answer was simple. One day her manuscript was selected as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and that she had no problem getting into the litmags after that. Many of the litmags pay lip service to being dedicated to showcasing the best writing around. But there's a guild mentality with the mags, part of which likely arises from the fact that poets and writers who wish to work in academia are desperate to publish in magazines with the best reputations in their field, so understanding this makes the publishing of lesser-quality poems by serious poets a little more excusable in my estimation. After all, can I really hold it against people for trying to secure a professional future for themselves? So though I find it aesthetically distasteful to read many of the poems in the quality mags that seem to be written by tone-deaf poets, many of the poems which cater to the most current literary fashions and trends, I am more tolerant of this than when I was a young poet and contentiously contemptuous of all this brazen hand-wringing.

This is not to say that one won't find some excellent poems in the most highly regarded literary journals. The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Parnassus, The Antioch Review, The Missouri Review, etc.. These are still the go-to places to find the best in up-and-coming literary talent. But Ezra Pound's pronouncement from about a century ago remains true to this day: "The supreme weeder is needed" if the the garden of the muses is to remain a garden. The assessment and re-assessment of what constitutes excellence in literature is an ongoing task. Often it's easy to know what's unquestionably without literary merit. Where it becomes more difficult is choosing what's essential reading, and discerning the difference between what's good and what's great. This part will always be debatable. But that which is unquestionably unimportant is usually fairly easy to determine.

Does this mean that we've got a glut of bad poets? No, I don't think so. We just have a glut of bad poems. If one, like Eliot or Wordsworth, manages to write only a handful of poems of everlasting importance, then she/he will have secured a place in literary history, and this is more than most can ever hope to accomplish. You'll still be well served by reading the litmags. You just can't take off your thinking cap and allow yourself to be convinced of the value of something just because an influential editor tells you that it's important, or because that author won the Pulitzer Prize, or anything like that. Reading the litmags, in fact, is a good exercise in applying your critical principles and impulses. Besides, the appreciation of literature is about more than always practicing one's principles of selection and assessment. I'm so happy to discover the occasionally exceptional poem that I'm willing to continue reading the little literary reviews, and to do my own weeding.

The ongoing question is not Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter." The real ongoing question is DOES it matter at any given time. Of course it always has the potential to matter, but the overabundance of bad literary work being passed off in the most influential literary sources can have a corrosive effect. Say someone who has never read the litmags picks up a copy of The Paris Review at a local bookstore, because someone told him that if we wants to see good contemporary poems being written today, that The Paris Review would be a good place to start. Well, if he reads a series of unremarkable poems in there, he might, understandably enough, think that contemporary poetry is suffering from a crisis of relevance and quality.

There are, however, poets that I return to when I'm looking to restore my faith in poetry–master practitioners from whom we can learn a lot about technique and aesthetic strategies, regardless of whether or not we may be tempted to imitate them. Wallace Stevens has this effect on me. I hope someone will punch me in the face if I ever write like Stevens, but I appreciate his poems and draw inspiration from them. But I would never send a new poet to his work, nor can I ever spend too much time at any given time reading his poems, as they are strange, dense, sometimes difficult, and I'm not sure that even he understands what he's doing all the time. But then, the poet Charles Simic once said that it took him years to understand that his poems are smarter than him.

My latest favorite discovery: Rae Hallstrom

I ran across the following poem by an award-winning Ohio writer whom I'd never heard of before. I was startled by the poem, which I found on Author's Den when I Googled her name. It was such an excellent poem, singularly accomplished, imaginative and very rich with sound-and-word-play. It's not a surprise, then, that's she's not a product of an MfA creative writing program. Excellent work comes out of the MfA programs on a regular basis, but sometimes poets working more in isolation are likely to develop a unique voice, and there's always the danger of being overly influenced by one's influences and writerly peers. Occasionally I will run across a poem that strikes me as being perfectly executed. It's not an easy task to pull off technical excellence while maintaining a confident and naturalistic tone the way this poem does. I come across native, untamed genius from time-to-time, and sometimes I see poems that demonstrate uninspired technical excellence, but it's a treat when you see the two of those elements combined. In an age when so many poets seem to have no ear for the music of language, this poem sings from beginning to end, starting with the dramatic assonance in the opening line: "Granite…dragged on flannel," the subtle alliterative soundplay in the third line "table…teeters on stilts, and followed up in the fourth line with the juxtaposition of soft, sustained, voice nasals (the letters 'n' and 'm') against the gently percussive interdental and glottal unvoiced and voiced stops (the letter "t" and "g"). This is a poem that will reward re-reading for those of us who like that kind of thing. I love the phrase "hot buttered nerves," which is just the sort of imaginative, playful, and surprising use of language which is often missing among our contemporary poets. And it's a good example to show that poetry can be excellent without being complex and inaccessible.

"Lathered," a poem by Rae Hallstrom

I am the granite of dry elbows dragged on flannel,
a porcupine with a cleaver,
a low table that teeters on stilts.
I am burnt toast, embers fuming for no good reason,
the pot that never boils.
You can taste me in the raspberry seeds
sucked from jam into a mouth ulcer,
feel me in the metal spatula of every step in tight underpants,
sense me in the snare drum in the bathroom.
I am not a walk in the park when the sky is blue.
Look for me in a cave of stomach acid,
in the cat locked in a closet after falling asleep on a shoe,
in a tangle of knots at the edge of hot buttered nerves.

Upcoming Rae Hallstrom event: Rae Hallstrom will be reading at Muggswigz in Canton on Friday, April 4, 2008, from 7-9 PM with several other poets.

About Rae Hallstrom:

Rae Hallstrom took home 3 awards last year in the Wayne College Regional Writing Contest. Her essay, "Grinded" won Third Place in the nonfiction category. Her short story "In the Cow Belt" and her poem "Apartment Complex" each received honorable mention. "The Tomato and the Dragon" appeared in the May 2006 issue of Releasing Times. Rae's horror story, "Tea for Two," might pass for a cozy in the mystery genre–none of that "in your face" blood or gore. "Tea for Two" debuted in January 2006, as the feature story in the 32nd issue of Outer Darkness. Rae's feature on dandelion wine appeared in Akron Life & Leisure in the May 2005 issue. Rae's poem "Floating into Tomorrow" appeared in 2002 in "Chances Are…, a Chrysalis Reader," published by the Swedenborg Foundation. Her poem inspired the cover art for the "Chances Are…" issue. "This Ancient Disappearing Act" won one of Ohio Poetry Day's First Prize awards and was published in the 2002 awards book. Another poem, The Elder, won a First Prize award in the 2000 Ohio Poetry Day competition. Her poem "Last Blush" found print in Volume 38 of Pudding Magazine. Her nonfiction essay, "The Age of Addiction," was published in "Rocking the Ages, a Chrysalis Reader," which was the foundation's millenium (2000) volume.

Click here to visit Rae Hallstrom's "Ameriku" haiku blog.

Click here to visit Rae Hallstrom's website.

Rager Media is a nationally distributed book publisher from Akron, Ohio.

–By Christopher D. White, Editor-in-Chief, Rager Media

To say that Luis Proenza inspires controversy is a tad understated. But then, when have people ever been quick to embrace that which is bold and imaginative? I think of the Roman poet Horace's claim: "Fortune favors the bold." That's because bold ain't easy. But who besides people like Proenza and Ted Curtis and other visionaries at the U of Akron have had the moxie to yank the best-laid plans of 1965-or-so off the dusty drawing board and thrust it up almost overnight against the Akron skyline? It reminds me of some lines in an Excellent song by uber-talented singer/songwriter/piano-hammerer Ben Folds called "Philosophy" : "Won't you look up at the skyline, at the mortar, block, and glass…You see this always used to be here./Even when this all was grass,/and I danced and singed about a high-rise. And you were laughing at my helmet, and/Laughing at my torch." A few more choice lines from that song: "Would you look at me I'm crazy/But I get the job done."

And how about this little stanza:

"You take the mortar, block, and glass,
And you forget the speech that moved the stone.
And it's really not that you can't see
The forest from the trees, it's just
You've never been out in the woods alone."

The University of Akron has a bright future. For the first time in my lifetime, the University of Akron looks like a world-class institution. Every time I have an author come to visit Akron for the first time, I always make it a point to take a walking tour of the University of Akron, and they are, without fail, highly impressed. Any previous anecdotal notions they had about Akron vanish. It's true, as Dr. Proenza points out in his television ads, that universities are the engines that drive our economy. This is particularly true in our current age, and will continue to be true as Akron is poised to be a leading center for learning and research. In conjunction with the forthcoming "Biomedical Corridor" project, the new $900 million facelift of the Goodyear World Headquarters, and other major projects in the works, we should be proud of the fact that Business Week magazine considers Akron to be one the great top tech cities of the future. And Luis Proenza's leadership is a big part of the reason. The "Landscape for Learning" is about more than some beautiful new buildings and extravagant landscaping. It's just as much about building bold symbols of Akron's increasing cosmopolitanization.

Certainly there are problems at the University of Akron, just as surely as there are problems at any large university campus. But a lot of these problems are common to any campus, and so success and progress should be measured in relation to the same issues that other universities face. The fact is that universities, like other major institutions, are flawed; one might reasonably go so far as to say that they're deeply troubled. But when evaluating the leadership of the University of Akron, it's not fair to assess success/failure without considering various realities including some deeply entrenched attitudes among faculty, and the fact that our national university culture has taken on a life of its own.

Take the problem of overpriced tuition. It's a problem everywhere in Ohio, and the U of Akron's skyrocketing tuition hasn't risen faster than the others. This doesn't make it any better, of course, but it does put it in perspective. I also think that it's encouraging to note that the University of Akron is the only public university in Ohio with INCREASING enrollment, at a time when decreasing enrollment in public Ohio universities is a formidable crisis. Sacrifices must be made, and some risks taken, if the University of Akron is to become a top-tier research university, and there's no reason to think that this is impossible to achieve. Accomplishing this will even benefit those not currently attending or planning to attend in the future, because it will increase the perceived value of a degree from the University of Akron.

As the president of the University of Akron, Luis Proenza cannot be made aware of every problem that arises, even though he will be expected to apologize for them. As the face of the university and the prime figurehead, he is, and will continue to be, a prime target for criticism every time someone on that campus makes a bad decision. This is not to say that he should be immune to criticism, but it's unrealistic to imagine that he can spend his days creeping around the campus with his ear to the ground trying to root out every problem that arises. Broad policy decisions and the like are obviously fair game, but good leadership often involves making very unpopular decisions. And keep in mind that Luis Proenza is a deeply intelligent and passionate visionary who really does have the best interest of the university of Akron and the larger community in mind. If the academics liked him too much, I'd be worried anyway, because the culture of academia tends to frown upon things like entrepreneurialism/free enterprise and unconventional and critical thinking. It's unexpected and refreshing to see the big ideas and innovations coming from what might be thought of as an unexpected source: a university president.

Pictured: Poet Michelle Moore at Summit Mall in Fairlawn, Ohio. Photo by Christopher D. White, Rager Media.

The following poem by Michelle Moore is from the chapbook of poems, The Deepest Blue, which was reviewed over the summer in The Ohioana Quarterly. Its title might lead someone to think that it's your typical, sentimental, greeting-card-style love poem, but the title is pleasantly misleading, as the freshness of the language and the images in the poem attest.

Ode to My Heart

O heart, lopsided valentine,
at times you seem more like a tooth
sunk root-deep in decay,
or a bird whose song is locked
outside its cage, and who can blame you,
confined as you are in that narrow dark
with a grasp of forever so complete,
any moment that calls for stillness after
motion rouses you. Ventriloquist’s dummy,
you hammer on when I go to sleep
or drink a glass of water. And your flair
for stalling or skipping rope or
falling out of love makes clear
your fear I might forget you.
But don’t imagine I’m unaware
of how that tick tick tick’s to remind me
you’re a suicide bomber searching
for a cause—often, I’ve wondered which
to cut, the red wire or the blue, but
truth be known, I couldn’t live without you.

Copyright by Michelle Moore

Art recovered from the Raw Umber Art Heist in Cleveland will be among the art displayed this Friday at Mocha Maiden on Maiden Lane in downtown Akron. Light refreshments will be served and there will be free admission to the upstairs gallery.

If you've never been to Mocha Maiden, it's located right across the street from the Main Library parking deck at the corner of High Street and East Market St. in Akron. Maiden Lane is a little alley tucked between some buildings on East Market. Incidentally, parking is free in that deck after 6pm. Mocha Maiden is an extremely charming little spot: small, intimate, very much in the style of a European coffee house.

Friday February 22,2008
6pm-10pm

Mocha Maiden
17 Maiden Lane
Akron, Ohio 44308

By Christopher D. White, Editor-in-Chief, Rager Media and The Akrocentric. Photos copyright by Christopher D. White

Some of you have asked about some photos that I took at Thursday's a number of years back. I've located the photos on my old computer, so here's part 1. Come back later this week for part 2 of these vintage Thursday's Lounge photos. Note to Mario Nemr: feel free to yank any of these that you want for thursdayslounge.com.

If you're unfamiliar with Thursday's, and/or you missed the last Thursday's photo post on The Akrocentric, here's what their website has to say about what makes this legendary nightclub such a unique spot:

What makes Thursday's unique?

Thursday's Lounge has become more than just an Akron dance club. People hail from all over Ohio and Western PA to check out Thursday's cool atmosphere and killer tunes. Live acts such as Milemarker, Mock Orange, Rant Music and Henry Rollins have also proven that Thursday's has become a nationally known nightclub and live music venue. Thursday's has been family owned since its creation in 1983. Not many bars can say they've been around that long as well as keeping the same great customers over such a long period of time. All of the Thursday's staff takes a great deal of pride in providing great entertainment as well as the strongest, best mixed drinks around. Some great people that helped us along the way are: Larry Smith, Tom Ickes, Brian Miten, Gary Blaine, Justin Kyer, Frank Spicer, Billy Cunningham, Skippy, Big Steve and the entire Akron Music Snob Club. Some great bands that have played at Thursday's back in the day are: The Nimrods, CD Truth, Strip, Poets of Another Breed, Van Dyke Brown, The View, The Walking Clampets, Exchange, Lazy American Workers, AXIS, Project 9, Blark, Headlights, the Living Blue, State of Being and many others.

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